The suck bucket

[willie59]

Here's another application of the suck bucket. I learned a long time ago, as a field mechanic, to try to control/contain my messes. First of all, property owners aren't too keen to find a big oil puddle on their ground. Second, the enviro implications can't get serious now days, don't need someone knocking on my door. But during this time, I've found I don't like to necessarily work in a mess anyway. So, what to do when you have to crack open a hyd line and don't have room to get a catch pan under it. Solution? The suck bucket. :tong

What we have here is a Kobelco SK480LC with a cracked seal boot at the center rotary joint. This has allowed rain water, and a lot of it, to get into the slew gear housing under the turntable, not good. If enough rain water is allowed to get in there, it will get into the slew ring bearing, very not good.



I don't have to remove the big lines in the center, can uncouple them from the flange connections where the hoses connects to pipes. But that large hose on the side, and the high drive pilot line on opposite side, I have to take them loose and remove the fittings to fit new seal boot. Now that's a good size line on the side, acutally the case drain line for the drive motors. I took it loose at the topside so it wouldn't siphon from tank, but when I pop that fitting loose, it's going to dump some oil. You know, that thing that if you spill a quart of oil on the floor...it actually looks like a gallon! LoL. Can't get any kind of pan under it to catch the oil, so grab the suck bucket. Place the vacuum tube from suck bucket under the fitting, and crack it open, suck up the oil as it drains out.



I was in an awkward position, so kinda fumbled the hose fitting when it came loose, spread a little oil. No problem, work the vacuum tube around and suck it up!



Once I got the old seal boot off, I emptied the oil from the suck bucket, and proceeded to draw out the water that had collected in the slew gear housing. Pulled about 8 gallons of water out of it in a short time. Hey...beats the heck out of removing that little drain hole plate under the rig and getting drowned in swamp water! Ha!



I've even built a little reservoir dam with clay oil dry around an area that a hose is being removed, sucked the oil out of the reservoir, then when finished, used the suck bucket hose to suck up the oily clay oil dry bits.

 

[RonG]

How did you get the new boot on,is it not one piece?You need to patent this suck bucket idea because there is going to be legislation soon that requires every service man to have one.Good luck with it.Ron G

 

[willie59]

How did you get the new boot on,is it not one piece?

Yes, the new boot was one piece RonG. Once I removed the case drain line and fitting, and the two speed pilot line and fitting from side of rotary joint, the boot simply slipped up the 4 drive hoses in the center. Simply had to disconnect the drive hoses where they connect to steel pipes with 4 bolt flange fittings, pull the 4 hoses together and tied them together with rope. Slipped the old boot off the hoses, slid a new one in place over the 4 hoses.

 

[td25c]

Adapt shop vac hose to suck bucket

We built & used the suck bucket working on the Grove crane couple weeks ago.It worked great and I was surprised how fast it sucked up hydraulic oil.Only trouble I had was the shop vac hose was bigger than the bucket outlet and was somwhat of a loose fit.Ended up cutting the "pull tabs" off & drilling an 1 1/4 inch hole in the bucket cap.Made for a nice fit in the vac hose.Worked great ATCO.Thanks for sharing the idea.

 

[willie59]

Dang 25c...that's just too cool!

 

[RobVG]

I'm really annoyed with this whole "suck bucket" thing ATCO. I paid $200 for a vacuum charged fluid evacuator that is slow as molasses...:Banghead

 

[willie59]

I'm really annoyed with this whole "suck bucket" thing ATCO. I paid $200 for a vacuum charged fluid evacuator that is slow as molasses...:Banghead

LoL.

Tell ya what RobVG, I'll help ya out. Send the molasses can back, get your money back, and send me the 200. I'll build ya a suck bucket and ship it to you, I'll even pay for the shipping. :tong

 

[RobVG]

LMAO!

You are so kind...

 

[willie59]

LMAO!

You are so kind...

:lmao:falldownlaugh

Well, ya have to be dripping with kindness to yack with the crew at our chatroom. LoL...not!

 

[td25c]

Bring a big suck bucket when entering the chatroom.:lmao

 

[willie59]

Bring a big suck bucket when entering the chatroom.:lmao

Yeah, like a 55 gal drum! lol

 

[Hendrik]

Now what about a blow bucket?

 

[willie59]

Well, I never considered that one Hendrik.

But here's the latest adventure, just had to share it with everybody. A bit of text to this one because the story is just too good. There's two certain co-workers that I work with that I and another co-worker have nicknamed Thing 1 and Thing 2 (the tornado twins in the book "The Cat in the Hat") for reasons that the nicknames explain. They typically work with our attachments, unloading, processing, loading, etc. Occasionally they get caught up with their tasks and need something to do, so if the boss doesn't have a particular task for one or both of them, he tells me to give them something to do.

Well, Thing 1 does things in a bit of a hurry, like everything is done in overdrive plus another gear. That may serve well loading/unloading 52' trailers with attachments, but generally not so good when wrenching. Yesterday, I was working on a customers Bobcat T200 and he asked if there's something he can do on it. Now, me being a bit picky about customers machines, I'm thinking "umm, No". So I looked around the shop, and said, "well, you can do an oil change on our Toyota forklift, the filters are on my bench". I told him he has to get the front wheels on blocks because a drain pan won't go under it.

Ok, so Thing 1 now has something to do, and Thing 2 can supervise. Sweet, back to the T200. Now we have a 10 ton overhead crane. It would be just too easy to grab the lifting eyes on the mast of the forklift with the crane, lift it up, and put some blocks under the front wheels. Not Thing 1 and Thing 2. I was working in the engine compartment of the T200 and kept hearing the Toyota diesel rev up. Rrrrrrrrrr......Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.....Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. I thought "what in the hell are they doing?" Walk across shop to get a view, Thing 1 was trying to drive up on 4" thick blocks by driving up against them and standing on the throttle. Wheels were spinning and gripping at the blocks, forklift bouncing up and down, while Thing 2 watched, I can only shake my head and say "just damn!" Somehow, he got lucky, the forklift launched and planted firmly on the blocks. I let them enjoy their success and went back to the Bobcat, still shaking my head.

Things were uneventful after that, it's just an oil change, right? Not with Thing 1 and Thing 2. After the task was finished, Thing 1 came in my office and told me the forklift won't crank, which baffled the hell out of me. I went and hit the keyswitch, sure enough, it wouldn't turn over. What the heck??? Checked the battery, it was good. It was like the engine was locking down. Checked several things, finally put a bar in a hole in convertor housing and tried to bar engine around, it wouldn't go, much head scratching ensued. Now this is a 4 cyl diesel that the oil fill hole is in the valve cover. I looked at the engine and asked Thing 1 why there was oil spilled on the valve cover and running down on the head, I figured surely even he would be smart enough to use a funnel. Well, he did use a funnel, but he replied that he overfilled the valve cover, meaning, he poured it in real fast. Remember...overdrive plus one more gear.

That's when it dawned on me what has happened. The front wheels are on blocks, the oil fill is on end of valve cover toward front of machine, and the crankcase vent is on the side of the valve cover about midways, meaning, oil fill was higher than crankcase vent. Crankcase vent hose goes to...you guessed it, the intake manifold. You know where it goes from there. Yep, oil goes right down into the cylinders when they tried to crank it, so it's now hydrolocked. I looked at Thing 1 and said "this is the first time I've seen an engine locked up from doing an oil change". Just damn.

Ok, so this morning, I have two tasks. 1) change Thing 1's nickname to "Tazmanian Devil", which seemed more appropriate, and 2) get the engine back to some form of normal order. Relatively simple task, get the oil out of combustion chambers. The question is how. As I see it, there are two options. First option: remove injectors, crank engine, allow the pistons to blast oil out of the injector holes, and make an oily mess all over the machine and shop, which I have no interest in cleaning up such mess as I tend to dislike a mess. Or second option...the suck bucket.





Ok, here's the patient, you can see the crankcase vent hose disconnected from the barb on the intake pipe.





Nice little oil puddle in the intake.





Remove the injectors, here's the holes that we have to work through.

 

[willie59]

Reduce the size of the vinyl tubing by using smaller diameter pieces of tubing.





For the last piece of tubing, I used a more rigid 1/4" ID tubing like you use to hook up ice maker on a refrigerator, easier to keep straight going into a hole into the cylinders.





Stick the tubing down the injector holes and evacuate the oil. Spray WD40 down holes, place rags over injector holes, crank engine to reduce the thick oil, continue to evacuate until it's clear enough to install injectors and fire off engine.

 

[RonG]

That is just plain scarey.I am accused of being difficult to work with because I don't want anybody touching anything that I am responsible for repairing.That was good detective work to troubleshoot the problem.
I worked for a guy who would have one employee take something apart and somebody else would have to put it back together such as rebuilding a carburator or something complicated enough that you could not be expected to know how it went together or even where all the parts to it might be.
He would have an engine pulled for an exchange and send the core back before we knew what needed to be reused on the old block.Good story.Ron G

 

[DrJim]

RonG. . . a friend used to work at the Chrysler dealership, and he often rebuilt motors (V-6 Mitsubishi, 6 cyl Jeep, etc.) From time to time when I would go by to visit him, I would drop an extra bolt on his parts cart. Just one.

 

[RonG]

RonG. . . a friend used to work at the Chrysler dealership, and he often rebuilt motors (V-6 Mitsubishi, 6 cyl Jeep, etc.) From time to time when I would go by to visit him, I would drop an extra bolt on his parts cart. Just one.

You're gonna pay for that someday!!LOL.Ron G

 

[biggrader]

Saw a little different version of this. Service guy I had come out to a project had a freon tank that he had welded some fittings on to. He then used one of the vacuum ports on his pickup truck ( gasser, in case thing 1 is watching) to create the vacuum. actually worked pretty good. just have to be carefull that u dont suck too much into the motor.( bad things could happen)

 

[willie59]

Not a bad idea using vacuum ports out on a jobsite BG.

 

[trukfan]

Nice solution Atco. I'm glad the suck bucket topic came up again, as I had to rig up one last week. The maintenance program I'm in sold an old power hacksaw where the coolant tank was built in and it needed to be drained. Problem was, no drain plug, which was odd. So, I copied your idea with a slight twist. I had some 5/8" clear hose with a female garden hose end, so I drilled a hole slightly larger than a 5/8" male end hose barb, and pushed it into the lid. Screwed the female end on and went happily sucked out 12 gals. of coolant. Thanks for the tip.